Easter quietly dropped from Easter eggs

Easter on course to become choc-fest as eggs lose their Christian flavour

It is a vanishing act worthy of the Easter bunny himself and just as mysterious.

Easter - the most important Christian festival of the year, celebrated by well over two billion people around the world - appears to be quietly disappearing: at least when it comes to eggs.

Growing numbers of chocolate eggs are on sale in the UK without any mention of the word “Easter” on the front of the packaging.

Many of Britain’s best known brands have quietly dropped the name of the Christian festival from their main branding, now selling Easter products labelled simply as “chocolate egg” or even “egg”, it has been claimed.

The Meaningful Chocolate Company, based in Manchester, was set up six years ago in an attempt to reintroduce Easter eggs with references to the Easter story and Advent calendars featuring nativity scenes to the mainstream market.

But since then, according to the company’s founder David Marshall, the secularising trend has been gone further, with many products now seemingly dropping references to Easter from the title altogether.

“It looks like there is a trend. A lot of businesses are not comfortable with the religious aspect of the festival."

“A lot of businesses are not comfortable with the religious aspect of the festival.

“If they want to make their product as attractive to as many people as possible it could well be that they want to remove references to the Christian festival because that will be seen as attaching to one faith tradition.”

But a spokesman for Nestlé insisted there had been no deliberate decision to drop the word Easter from its eggs and that customers would make an “automatic” link with the festival even if the word was not present.

“Chocolate eggs have been synonymous with Easter and the Easter story since the beginning of the last century and the association is now an automatic one," he said.

“There has been no deliberate decision to drop the word Easter from our products and the name is still widely used at Nestlé.”